To-do?

[lb_lee]

Stuff we are in the process of writing or want to write about but haven't been able to scrape together the brain resources required:

• Essay on plural shared dreams
• Another essay on crisis planning
• Monsterhood from a disability liberation perspective (AKA Cripping Monsterfucking, because I've seen people engage with monsterhood and monster romance from queer, critical race, and feminist theories, but not disability liberation. (If I just haven't been looking in the right place and you can shower with me with examples to prove me wrong, please do.)
• Disabled God stuff, because the book has given me a lot of food for thought, but there are too many thoughts to squish into one place.

Comments

[starfallhaven]

We're really interested in all of these. No pressure! But looking forward to reading them. -Korra (she/they)

[acorn_squash]

Gosh, me too! Those all sound awesome.

[grahamlore]

Can't wait to read any/all of these! And we gotta get a copy of the Disabled God - it sounds like there's a lot of good stuff in there.

[lb_lee]

I'm torn between going, "Do you want me to bring my copy tomorrow?" and "no, no, I have already dumped many books on them, do not overwhelm them with EVEN MORE BOOKSIES"

I am absolutely using this comments section to try and sort the confetti in my head

[lb_lee]

Mori: Like, here's some of the threads that are in this rope I want to spin, I just can't hang on to all of them at the same time enough!

The Disabled God deals with Christianity from a physical disability perspective, with disabled liberation. I really need that disabliberation and a lot of the sensible things she says, but Eiesland admits that stuff on mad religion is scarce on the ground.

Spirit Marriage hits with the subaltern pluralish spirituality a lot, but from a more abled perspective.

Storied Lives hits the personal mythos, which also meshes well with the fiction-based religion articles, which all interweave in plural stuff, but I haven't seen people treat EITHER from a disability or plural perspective.

And then you've got the zines of the Mary Nardini Gang, specifically Be Gay Do Crime about embracing the end of the world while inhabiting the next, death and queer spirituality and oppression, but are more about liberation in general than religion.

So that's like five different threads that I keep wanting to interweave, and my brain just can't hold them all together and everything keeps threading into everything else, and I can't figure out how to organize it to keep myself on track enough to get anything done. I need to figure out an outline or something!!!!

[acorn_squash]

You might like Riva Lehrer's Golem Girl, which definitely does use monstrosity as a metaphor for disability, although there's no monster romance. I really liked this memoir; I'd recommend it without question.

There's also Suniya Dean's The Book Eaters, a fantasy book that came out recently that centers a species created by, and abandoned by, aliens as a metaphor for autistic people (a clever exploration of a common theme). I thought its portrayal of autistic creativity was excellent, but that its focus on the struggles of parenting disabled kids was problematic in a way that I didn't expect from an autistic author. Again, no monster romance.

And I loved Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, which was a scholarly work exploring ableism in fairy tales, which of course intersected with monster romance at times (Beauty & the Beast, etc). It was super readable and a lot of fun - I learned about some fairy tales I'd never heard of before.

[lb_lee]

Ooh, I'd bought and read Golem Girl already (and enjoyed it very much, for exactly the reason you described), but I didn't know the others! Reserved Disfigured from the library, and best of all, now I know the exact search terms for the library catalog to find the stuff I want! (It's "people with disabilities in literature" under Subject.) Thanks!

[acorn_squash]

You're welcome! Oh, and I know Dear Senthuran is on your reading list - I'm reading it right now, and it's very definitely about monstrosity, among other things.

[lb_lee]

Oooooh, when you finish, would you give CWs (or submit to pluralstories, if applicable)? Emezi is like gray Folie for me, good but brutal, and unlike Folie, Emezi's books don't come with content warnings.

[acorn_squash]

I'm a singlet, so I can't submit to pluralstories, but I'm happy to give content warnings! I have them about half-done, going chapter by chapter. (The nice thing about Dear Senthuran is that each chapter stands alone more or less, so if there's a particular thing you want to avoid or a particular thing that you really want to read about, it's possible to tailor your experience that way.)

[lb_lee]

Ah, fair enough! In that case, CW away! (And we might relax the plural-submission rule. We haven't had issues with floods of bogus submissions or "but Split is really good though!" So the rule may not be beneficial.)

[sinistmer]

The monsterhood one sounds especially interesting, but I like your perspective on things so I'll be happy to read what you put out.